


A Place To Land

by seimaisin



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-01
Updated: 2008-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-14 21:51:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seimaisin/pseuds/seimaisin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story in which Joe has always been a girl.</p><p><i>“Reporters are all assholes,” Pete said, sitting down next to Jo.</i></p><p><i>“So are you.”</i></p><p><i>“Yeah, but you love me anyway.”</i></p><p><i>“Yeah, that’s the bitch of it, isn’t it?”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A Place To Land

It was a Thursday night, and they were in the middle of a run through a part of the Southeast that made Jo think of antebellum mansions and old women sipping fruity cocktails. “Maybe,” she told the local roadie as she passed him the joint, “maybe I’ll be one of those women someday. Move someplace close to the sea, play bridge, ogle the cute young guys who come to mow my lawn. Sounds like a great way to grow old.”

The roadie laughed. (What was his name? John? Jimmy? Josh?) “I’m trying to picture my grandma with a sleeve of tattoos now.”

Jo’s mouth twisted into a mock scowl, but she laughed along with him. “Hey, man, I plan to be someone’s grandma someday. It’ll happen!”

She sat on the railing outside the crew entrance with Jeff (that was it!) for another forty-five minutes, cheerfully ignoring his unsubtle hints about empty dressing rooms and time on their hands. Every once in a while, she inched away from a creeping hand, until she stood on the pavement across from him, continuing her monologue about the merits of Bruce Dickinson’s solo albums while pretending she didn’t see him silently reformulating a plan to get laid. She didn’t want to turn him down aloud – god, she hated being that awkward - but this guy’s eyes were too far apart. It freaked her out. Also, he kinda laughed like a hyena. Finally, an hour and a half after she’d seen Pete and Ashlee disappear onto the bus, Jo patted Jeff on the shoulder. “Thanks for the company, man. See you around!” From the look on his face, she figured there’d be mutters around the city’s union crew that included the word “dyke.” Ah, well. Life on the road.

On the bus, she kicked off her sneakers and stretched out on the sofa. She could hear soft voices coming from the back bedroom, so she grabbed her iPod and stuck the buds in her ears.

Some time later, after the bus had jerked into the movement that only became smooth and soothing after they hit the freeway outside of town, Jo had just finished her second read-through of the latest Spin when she felt a tap on her legs. “Move your ass,” she heard over the music, and obligingly raised her legs to allow Pete to sit underneath them. He wore only a pair of jeans and a set of nail scratches down his sides. Jo resisted the urge to poke her finger at the scratches and make some sort of raunchy joke – Pete wasn’t terribly tolerant of jokes that involved Ashlee, she’d learned that the hard way. (And Jo was one of the people who actually liked Ashlee. It was nice to have another girl on the road sometimes.) He plucked the magazine from her hands. She turned off her iPod. “Shit, I’ve read this three times,” Pete grumbled, tossing the magazine to the floor. “Wanna play Halo?”

They turned the volume down so low that they had to sit inches from the television to hear the sound effects. Ashlee was a light sleeper, and had been known to stumble bleary-eyed out to the lounge to sit and watch them play in the middle of the night. She never complained, but Jo knew that she preferred sleep to watching shit blow up. Besides, in the middle of the night, watching Pete’s face glow green from the light of the television screen … this was hers. She didn’t feel like sharing.

Jo woke in the morning curled up on the couch, with Pete’s head resting on her thighs. Her legs were numb, her shoulder ached, and the television still displayed a paused game of Halo. While Jo contemplated movement, Ashlee walked out of the bedroom. She passed them without blinking. “I’m going to make coffee, want some?”

“Yes, you’re a goddess.” Jo finally stretched her legs, and Pete moved, groaning. She threaded a careless hand through his hair, and chuckled when it stuck straight up from his head. He turned over and pressed his face into the back of the couch when she stood up. Jo turned to Ashlee to find her watching them, her face thoughtful. Jo shrugged, and cursed the million tiny knives that suddenly jabbed at the skin of her thighs. “Serves you right,” Ashlee said lightly.

Jo just grinned, and headed back to grab a set of clean clothes.

***

Jo kept a box in her parents’ house – she’d never moved it out to her own place, not even after her ex-boyfriend moved out and gave her three extra closets for storage space – of all the magazines Fall Out Boy had ever appeared in. Articles only, after a while; she’d gotten tired of tracking down all the paparazzi shots of Pete after a while. She reread most of them from time to time, just to remind herself where they’d been. Some of the articles were funny, a completely fictionalized view of their lives based on ten minutes of interaction, which usually involved Pete deciding to make up the stupidest lies he could possibly come up with just to see if he could convince the reporter of their validity. Once upon a time, Patrick had felt the need to try to counter-balance Pete’s stories with the truth, but Jo had always been content to sit back and practice contorting her face into an expression that wasn’t a smirk.

The first Rolling Stone they’d ever had a full-length article in sat at the bottom of the box. Jo didn’t pull that one out very much. It was cool and all – fucking Rolling Stone, man, she’d had a subscription since she was twelve, so seeing their faces staring back at her from the page was infinitely cooler than anything they’d done up to that point, bar none – but the article itself was sort of bullshit. A lot of talk about Pete’s personality and Patrick’s music, same thing they always heard, with only a cursory mention of either her or Andy. Which, again, same shit, different day, but most articles were nicer than to simply call Jo “the frizzy-haired girl on guitar.” At least Andy had gotten a whole paragraph about his tattoos and his politics. She’d just been a footnote. The girl on guitar, nothing special, not nearly as interesting as any of her band mates. That stung. Not even the fact that it was her damned band – her idea, her introductions – had registered on the reporter’s radar. “Maybe,” she’d told Pete at the time, flinging the magazine at him, “you should just hire a monkey to play guitar for you. Or maybe a midget. It’d get you more press.”

Pete had just grinned. “Could we train the monkey to clean the bus like you do?”

Normally, she would have continued the joke (“I could probably train the monkey to shit in your bunk, it would improve the smell”), but that day she just stalked off and found a quiet lounge in the back of the venue. She was laying on the floor with her feet propped up on the couch when Pete’s upside-down form appeared in her line of sight. “Reporters are all assholes,” he said, sitting down next to Jo.

“So are you.”

“Yeah, but you love me anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s the bitch of it, isn’t it?”

Pete broke out into another grin and grabbed at her arm. The wrestling match that ensued ended with Pete’s head being ground into the leg of the couch. He complained about the lump for three days. Sometimes, there was an advantage to being taller than him. Of course, he’d also probably let her win, too.

(A few days later, she visited Pete’s LiveJournal and found a rambling post entitled “people who suck” that referenced _“morons who are just jealous we have an awesomely hot chick guitarist.”_ Her cheeks warmed, but she never mentioned it to Pete.)

Nowadays, she just let that magazine lay in the bottom of the box. What the hell – that reporter probably still had to shove his way into shitty clubs to interview shitty bands for shitty articles. Meanwhile, she had a house in Chicago and a house in L.A. and more than ten thousand people packed into arenas every night. Expensive cream shit from the silly chic salon in L.A. could fix her hair problems. Reporters would have to be assholes until the end of time. She almost felt sorry for the guy, really.

***

Jo remembered a time when Pete Wentz seemed like the most fascinatingly interesting person she’d ever laid eyes on. Back when she was fifteen and he’d agree to get her into clubs that wouldn’t ID her, if only she’d do something stupid like steal a six-pack of PBR from the grocery store and pass it out to the little old ladies at the quilting store up the street. Some other girls who hung out drifted away, talking about feeling degraded and used, but Jo always knew the tricks were just entertainment, at least for Pete. When they went to shows, it was always a different story – he’d come up behind her and sling an arm around her shoulder, pointing out the bass player’s tattoos or the way the singer made the same gesture every time he got to the bridge of the song. She’d counter by telling him how easy the guitar riff was, how she could do it without a problem if she just had an hour or so to practice. It was mostly bravado, of course, but one day Pete had challenged her to do just that. Luckily, the particular guitarist she’d been talking about only knew three damned chords, so she faked it easily enough.

She played her first show with Arma Angelus the next weekend. Her knees didn’t stop shaking for three hours after the show, but when Pete stepped back from the mic at the end of the show and grinned at her, she knew she never wanted to be anyplace else.

***

“Wanna mess with their heads?” Pete’s lips brushed her ear. He spoke just loud enough to be heard over the din of the crowd. Jo didn’t know what stage they were next to – the only current movement on the stage was two roadies hauling monitors off to the side. The Warped crowd milled around them, most of them more hardcore than those she usually saw in the audience for their sets these days. It was easy, then, to spot the group Pete referred to – five girls, just off to their right, watching the two of them as they browsed the food vendors in search of the guy selling mini-donuts. (“That bastard moves every show,” Pete swore, “just to fuck with us.” Finding him had become a daily quest.)

Every time Jo turned in their direction, the girls started whispering to each other and looking at whatever booth they stood next to with great interest. “Sure,” she said without hesitation. Because, seriously, just come and say hello – it wasn’t like either of them would bite. Well, okay, she couldn’t vouch for Pete, but most girls seemed to like that from him.

And just as she was thinking about Pete and the inappropriate things he did with his mouth … he covered hers with his. She heard herself squeak, and flailed her arms a moment before grabbing his biceps. “Smooth, Trohman,” he muttered against her mouth, but didn’t move away.

So, yeah, Pete was kissing her, with open mouths and tongues right in the middle of everyone in the fucking world. This was new. And pleasant. Okay, more than pleasant. Pete’s tongue slid against her bottom lip, and she gripped his arm hard enough that he made a noise at the pressure. His arms went around her waist; she felt him roll his hips, probably unconsciously, and she shuddered. She always knew he could move, but this close, feeling it … it wasn’t something she ever really thought about, dammit. “Fuck, Pete,” she heard herself say, her voice a rough tone that she didn’t recognize.

At her words, Pete pulled back an inch, just enough for their faces not to touch. His breath hit her face in hot, heavy bursts, more humid than the summer air surrounding them. At this distance, his eyes looked nearly black, completely unreadable. He didn’t let go of her waist; if anything, his grip tightened slightly, holding their hips flat against each other for a long split second.

And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over – Jo didn’t know who let go first, but she felt the air move around her and heard the catcalls from some of the guys walking past them. The girls who had been stalking them were gone. Pete looked around, shrugged, then looked past her. “Dude, I think I smell them!” he said.

Jo had no idea what he was talking about until he pointed past her, to the next aisle. As soon as she saw the booth, though, the smell of cinnamon donuts assaulted her nose. She looked back at Pete, saw his careful smile, and consciously matched it. “Once again victorious!” she crowed.

As they dashed for a place in line, Pete grabbed her hand. It was a short squeeze, but it made Jo grin.

(A photo of the kiss made it up onto Absolute Punk’s message board. The resulting thread crashed the server for an hour and a half. Jo felt unreasonably proud.)

***

Jo didn’t make it to LA until a month after Pete broke up with Ashlee. Patrick was there at the time, working on someone else’s record while Jo was in Chicago convincing her relatives that she still loved them all. When Patrick came back to Chicago, he’d shrugged when talking about Pete. “Oddly enough, it didn’t go all that bad. Dare I say, they both handled it like adults.” When Jo gaped, Patrick nodded. “Shocking, I know.”

Pete, for his part, hadn’t really talked about it too much. “It just wasn’t working,” he told Jo over the phone. “It’s okay.” She believed him, because past breakups had been accompanied by lots of cryptic poetry posted to seventeen different blogs, not email spam of YouTube videos consisting of a fat guy in a Speedo performing the entire Miami Sound Machine catalog. (When she found herself humming “Conga” in line at the grocery store, she called Pete’s voice mail and sang “I Am Henry VIII I Am” in an off-key voice until the beep cut her off. The resulting text message – _“you fucking bitch, eat my ass”_ – gave her much joy while she was stuck ferrying her great-aunt to a bingo tournament.)

The night Jo flew to LA, Pete and Travis were DJing a VIP party at some club she’d never heard of. They invited her to join them, but she begged off, knowing that jet lag would kill her until the next day at the earliest. Her flight was late, besides, and she didn’t stumble into her house until nearly one in the morning. When she went to set her guitar case down on the couch, she saw a book lying face down on a cushion – the new Neil Gaiman book, she noted, the one she hadn’t read yet - spine creased in half. A coffee cup lay on the table next to the couch, leaving a ring on the maple wood that the interior designer had told her cost more than two months’ rent on Jo’s first apartment. “So that’s where my spare key went,” she said aloud. She made a face and immediately headed for the kitchen for the Pledge and a dust rag.

In the kitchen, on the island just above the sink, Jo noticed a small white paper bag, top crinkled shut. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon. A closer look found half a bag of mini-donuts, with a note scrawled on a torn-out sheet of notebook paper underneath it. _“I bought you some donuts, but I eated them.”_ Underneath, a squiggle that looked like a squashed muffin with some haphazard lines sticking out from the sides – there was also a helpful arrow to a caption that read _“sad-faced kitten.”_

Jo collapsed into bed soon after with a smile on her face and cinnamon sugar coating her lips.

She woke up to the feeling of her bed dipping next to her. When she opened her eye, she saw the faint orange glow of early sunrise seeping past the edges of the window shade, and a tattooed forearm snaking over her waist. “Missed you,” Pete’s voice came almost too soft to hear.

She grabbed his hand. “Get under the covers, asshole,” she said, yawning.

Jo fell back asleep with Pete’s face pressed into the back of her neck.


End file.
